Blogging Roller

From the Roller-dev list:

Lance: Castor is *supposed* to be caching objects for us so that we don't need to make repeated calls to the database. I suspect the way we are using Castor may not be optimal, though I really don't know enough to suggest improvements.

Webapps seem to cause problems for O/R frameworks. In an O/R framework, things seem to work properly only inside of a O/R "transaction" or "session." In a webapp, you get an object from the database in one session, close that session, allow the user to modify the object in an HTML form, then start another session to update the object in the database. Castor calls this a "long transaction." I wonder how these long transactions effect Castor's ability to cache efficiently.

As you can see, I've returned to mismanaging my time (i.e. blogging). I've finished the 2nd drafts of my Wrox Professional JSP chapters. The reviewers seemed to like my 1st drafts, especially the Performance and Debugging chapter, but that did not stop them from making hundreds of comments and thus burning two perfectly good weekends.

Speaking of Wrox, I picked up JBoss 3.0 Deployment and Administration Handbook by Meeraj Kunnumpurath the other day. I like the new small and concise handbook format. You don't need a wheel-barrow to move it around the office like most Wrox books. The book appears to be perfect for somebody, like me, who already knows J2EE and just needs to understand how to configure and deploy to JBoss.

Ted Neward reviews The Middleware Company's recent <a href= "http://www.theserverside.com/resources/article.jsp?l=TMCBestPractices">J2EE best practices document. He agrees with almost all of the practices and goes into detail on the three that he dislikes.

Patrick Peak offers an excellent and detailed introduction to Tiles, the Struts document assemby framework, on his new blog.

This alleged Sun internal memo is making the rounds. According to the memo, engineers at Sun are not very happy with the large memory footprint and generally poor performance characteristics of the Solaris JRE. They want SPARC Java to be as light and nimble as SPARC Python. Who can argue with that?

A Slashdot reader recently dug up some details on the feature set of the upcoming Java 1.5 release including: Autoboxing, <a href= "http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/jsr/tiger/enhanced-for.html">Enhanced-For-Loop, Enumerations and Static Imports. Back in August, Henry Yandell summarized the official and somewhat different Java 1.5 feature list from JSR-176 J2SE 1.5 (Tiger) Release Contents.

<a href= "http://www.joeygibson.com/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/2003/02/07#tech/eclipse/M5Install">Joey Gibson explains how easy it is to upgrade from 2.1 M4 and points out the new and noteworthy features list. Don Park says "Eclipse will become the second most popular IDE behind Microsoft's Visual Studio." I said something similar a couple of months ago.

Thanks for the vote of confidence <a href= "http://www.dominicdasilva.com/index.do?date=20030207#152253">Dominic. I'll be working hard this weekend to live up to your expectations. One of my chapters just came back from review and I have my work cut out for me.

Dominic da Silva: After reading through the summary of Professional JSP 2.0, and knowing of some of the authors such as <a href= "http://www.raibledesigns.com/page/rd">Matt, <a href= "http://rollerweblogger.org/page/roller/">Dave, and <a href= "http://www.wrox.com/books/1861007701.htm">Sam Dalton and Dan Jepp, I expect this book to be a must have for any JSP developer out there. Having Struts, Tomcat and MySQL in there as well is a plus.

James Strachan reports a new top-level project at Apache db.apache.org for database related technologies:

James Strachan: Various database related projects will be moving under one roof such as ObjectRelationalBridge, Torque as well as various db commons projects like commons-sql, DBCP and maybe even PoolMan.

Borland is moving Java veteran <a href= "http://www.borland.com/news/press_releases/2003/01_27_03_borland_accelerates_acquisition.html"> Tony de le Lama to Raleigh, NC to head-up research and development for the Together products. According to <a href= "http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,848792,00.asp">eWeek, former Sun marketing exec George Paolini will be taking de la Lama's place at Borland HQ in Scotts Valley, CA.

Stuart Halloway: At the last Triangle JUG meeting I was stunned by the level of unemployment in the local Java community. Here's something that may help. <a href= "http://www.techengage.com">TechEngage is a new non-profit organization dedicated to providing technical training for out of work IT folk.

In a recent <a href= "http://www.fawcette.com/javapro/2003_02/magazine/features/dsavarese/default_pf.asp">JavaPro article Daniel Savarese helps you choose between serialization, JDBC, EJB, JDO, and JAXB for Java object persistence. He ignore the O/R frameworks, I suppose, because they are non-standard.

There was a record crowd at the RTP-WUG meeting tonight. Shakeel Mahate presented a nice overview of Struts and Thomas Roche presented an energetic and entertaining overview of the (Eclipse-based) <a href= "http://www-3.ibm.com/software/info1/websphere/index.jsp?tab=products/studio">WebSphere Studio's Struts tooling. There was not much time left for Jason Garcowski, who provided a brief demo of IBM's example "Trade" application.

The Struts tools were pretty impressive and included a Struts tag-aware WYSIWYG JSP/HTML editor, a sophisticated struts-config.xml editor, and an innovative Struts Web Diagram Editor or 'Woody' as Thomas called it. If you want to learn more about these tools, visit the WebSphere Studio Zone or check out IBM's redbook titled <a href= "http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg246806.html?Open">Legacy Modernization with WebSphere Studio Enterprise Developer. Chapters 4 through 7 provide a good introduction both to Struts and the WebSphere Studio Struts tooling - including lots of screen-shots like the one below.

I mentioned this before, so this is just a reminder. The meeting starts at 6PM at IBM.

Whether you back Java or Dot-Net you have to agree that Carlos Perez's 101 Reasons Java is better than Dot-Net has resulted in some very interesting discussions. I've learned a lot from reading the responses from both camps. The latest and so far the best post on the topic is Ted Neward's <a href= "http://www.neward.net/ted/weblog/index.jsp?date=20030126#1043568228687">85 of 101 Reasons, Rebutted.

This looks like it could be useful. Congrats to Matt and team. I am looking forward to taking a closer look at the code.

Charles Ditzel has taken the time to write a thoughtful article in the form of a weblog entry on Swing versus SWT. For those who have been stuck on the server-side for their entire Java careers: Swing is Sun's emulation-based Java UI toolkit and SWT is IBM's native widget-based Java UI toolkit. Charles works for Sun, so you can expect to find a little bias in the article. For example:

Charles Ditzel, Comparing Swing and SWT: Swing can provide a look and feel that exactly matches that of the platform, provides a more consistent cross-platform story, and offers a level of flexibility far and beyond what is possible with SWT.

I have yet to see a Swing-based GUI that exactly matches the Windows look-and-feel. There is always some noticable difference, and where is that Windows XP look and feel? Other than that, he has some good points (disclaimer: I know Swing, but not SWT). If you care about Java GUI development then the article is well worth a read.

One thing that Charles fails to point out is that Swing is intended to be a general purpose GUI toolkit whereas SWT is intended to support Eclipse. SWT/JFaces may grow into a world-beating general purpose GUI toolkit someday, but right now Swing is the choice for general purpose Java GUI development. Maybe that is why the payware version of Eclipse (Websphere Studio) supports GUI building with Swing and AWT and not with SWT.

<a href= "http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-ecgui1/?ca=dnt-43"> A. O. Van Emmenis: "Even outside the Eclipse Workbench, JFace's pluggable design still allows you to develop sophisticated GUIs with surprisingly little code."

Via Wes Felter's Hack the Planet:

The latest GNOME summary includes a note from Sun that they've finally written a Swing PLAF that looks like Gtk+, to be included in Java 1.5.

Jason Carreira convinced his company to go with Webwork over Struts. From the Webwork mailing list:

Jason Carreira: Well, it really came down to usability issues. We looked at things like having to have separate FormBeans tied to the Actions 1-1 (because you have to cast to the expected FormBean subclass). Also, we looked at some sample code for Struts and Webwork (we looked at code for Chiki, a Wiki implemented with Struts, and Jira. Thanks Mike for having clean code!). It was very apparent that you had to do a lot of busy work to initialize things and do the setup that the framework should have done for you in Struts, whereas in Webwork, it was pretty much all business code. Command driven actions were also a big hit, as our lead architect came from a Next background, and apparently they did code like that all the time. In general, I think it was just a general feeling that Webwork was better abstracted and architected than Struts.

One interesting point: Jason used Struts' popularity against Struts by arguing that Webwork's smaller user and developer base would make it easier for his company to lobby for and submit changes and improvements.

A bunch of interesting Java related news items appeared on InfoWorld (and eWeek) over the past day or so.

• Sun readying J2EE 1.4 for a February 2003 release which will include SOAP, WSDL. Sun also "presented a laundry list of technology and promotional efforts" including:


• Sun intends to cooperate more with open source developers and will boost Linux support, but still has no plans to open source Java itself.


• Sun won't support IBM's Eclipse IDE project, but will back Oracle's recently submitted JSR-198 specification for pluggable Java IDE. I guess they think this will prevent a total eclipse.


• Sun will work to simplify the Swing APIs (what JSR is that?) and the Java language via JSR 175. JSR-175 is a new Java specification for adding meta-data to Java classes.


• Judge gives Microsoft 120 days to ship Java. This has been widely reported in the Java blogosphere. Microsoft's lawyer says "This is very, very messy, very, very complicated."


• Sun posts $2 billion loss, slight profit. "Price competition has also been brutal in high-end computers." The article concerns financial matters, so, of course, there is no mention of Java. eWeek reports on this as well and adds that Sun is planning 11% layoffs during 2003.


• SAP's new release of <a href= "http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/03/01/16/030116hnsapnetweaver.xml">mySAP will support both Java and Dot-Net. The article does not describe how this will be done, but it does seem to indicate that Java and J2EE are the heart of mySAP and that Dot-Net support will be done via Web Services. eWeek also reported this story.